Set along a shallow stretch of the Tennessee River in the northwestern corner of Alabama, the communities of Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia are known collectively as the Shoals.

Can you even call yourself a Southerner if you don’t spend at least a quarter of the year griping about the heat (and don’t forget the humidity)? But during a season when the forecast seems permanently set to “scorching,” you can still find pockets of delicious coolness—and we don’t mean the blast radius around your air-conditioning vent.

Checking in at Hotel Domestique in the foothills of South Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains is like arriving at a European country manor.

Born in Acadiana (Louisiana’s historically French region) in the sixties, a plate lunch is a working person’s meal. Portions are large so as to keep hunger at bay until nightfall.

Their primary job is to serve the most central of daily meals: lunch. They are early risers, okra choppers, roux stirrers, crowd herders. They are keepers of their family’s long-held recipes. They bear up under pressure. They are survivors.

Recently, after a particularly gloomy day of virtual school, my 11-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son were in tears. “I’m so sick of screens!” she said. “I’m sick of everything,” he said. It was all I needed to hear.

If you can’t visit these establishments, at least you can do the next best thing—re-create their signature drink or dish from the comfort of your home.

I stumbled onto Jekyll Island’s Driftwood Beach for the first time nearly a decade ago. This was, not coincidentally, the same week that a spider wrote me a note.